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I am currently a Senior DBA for Integrys Energy Services in Green Bay, WI. I’ve been a DBA since 2008 and have worked primarily with SQL Server versions 2005 and above supporting databases as large as 6TB.

Although my title says “DBA”, I also play the role of SAN administrator and data warehouse developer. I love learning and applying new technology and have a passion for making the environment I support as fast as possible. My blog is syndicated from www.adamkreul.com and you can follow me on Twitter at @AdamKreul.

I recently had the opportunity to attend a three day Agile development workshop. At a very high level, Agile development values making small, iterative changes over short periods of time, unlike traditional software development methods that generally involve a large release at the very end of a project. If you’ve… Read more

If we could take a picture of the HA solutions currently offered in SQL Server, database mirroring would be the short guy in the back, standing on his tippy toes trying to make sure everyone remembers he was there. Despite this, and the fact that it’s been marked as a… Read more

Most database professional recognize they have a good career path, and mostly enjoy the work they do. It’s possible to cross the line of enjoying it a little too much though. Here’s some guidelines to asses your situation:

1. Instead of being excited for the weekend, you’re anxious for Monday… Read more

If you’ve been a DBA for more than a day, you probably have a pretty good idea of what a login is. However, did you know that you can access resources outside of SQL Server without granting the login permissions everywhere, and also run job steps under accounts that don’t… Read more

SQL Server has the ability to monitor both server and database level events via the SQL Server Audit feature. Audited events can be written to the server application or security logs, or to a file where you specify the location (the most secure route). SQL Server Audit is easy to… Read more

Your servers are either provisioned or racked, your sys admin has taken care of installing the Failover Clustering feature and creating the cluster itself, so you’re good to go to start installing SQL Server right? Not quite – you still need a few other things and unless you’re a in… Read more

I recently was involved in a discussion about whether or not to enable the ‘Optimize for Ad Hoc Workloads’ server configuration setting. My initial thought was to leave it disabled, since this is the default after all, and we didn’t have a specific situation where it was believed enabling this… Read more

Last week, I took the 70-461: Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012 exam. I decided recently to try and achieve getting my MCSE: Data Platform certification within the next six months. Taking this exam was step one, and now I have four remaining. Rather than spending a bunch of money on…Read more

The run-time metric gets all the love, and for good reason. It’s easily witnessed by end users and the one management cares about. When DBAs have the task of cutting down the run time of a query, this typically starts in a non production environment, consisting of different server architecture… Read more

I haven’t been at this blogging thing an extremely long time, and I certainly haven’t been as consistent as I’ve wanted to (working hard on this though – at least one post a week!). There is no getting around it – blogging is time consuming. Especially technical blogging. My first…Read more

Often, when DBAs are looking at total wait statistics on the servers they manage, CXPacket is at or near the top of the list. If this is the case for you as well, chances are your server isn’t on fire, but there could be room for improvement.

What Does It…

When Fusion IO burst onto the scene in 2007, offering a PCIe card that was said to be able to achieve 100,000 IOPS, the IT world went wild. While Fusion IO certainly is a pioneer in the PCIe SSD space, this technology has come a long way in its short…Read more

Imagine this scenario: One of your servers just crashed, and you open a ticket with Microsoft for them to perform a root cause analysis and hopefully find a solution. What you get instead is this: “Unfortunately, all we were able to capture was a mini dump that doesn’t provide us… Read more

Databases and newborns have a lot in common. They both require constant care. They both require constant monitoring. They also may both puke on you in the middle of the night. Unlike newborns, however, you can set up automated maintenance plans for databases. If you’re starting a new gig as… Read more

A while back I had written a post about why I’m excited about Hekaton (now called ‘In-Memory OLTP’ – not sure why, Hekaton is much more fun to say), and while I am certainly still excited about this new feature, it does have some significant barriers to entry. Here’s a… Read more

In one of SQL Server Central’s recent daily newsletters, Steve Jones’s editorial was inquiring whether or not anyone has been using the CLR (common language runtime) integration within SQL Server. Recently, a change in a business process dictated that we needed to delete over 3 billion rows from a 16… Read more

If you work in IT, the office becomes your second home. It’s where we make a living, and most of us take a lot of pride in the work we do. We feel good when we’ve put in a successful day at the office, however we also have those days…

I’m just a little late to the party, but no time like the present, right? I plan to be very active responding to #sqlhelp requests, and will be posting my latest blog posts. I would greatly appreciate a follow (@AdamKreul), and would be happy to return the favor!Read more

That guy or gal over there going on and on about spindles and IOPS – that’s your SAN admin. For the sake of your SQL Server environment, you two need to develop a solid relationship. Here’s some basic SAN lingo to get you started:

LUN

If you administer a SQL Server Reporting Services server, chances are you’ve had users complain the report manager is loading slow. You go out the report manager to investigate, and it loads normally. You have the end user try again, and this time it works fine for them too. You…Read more